Inside Pak’s disinformation campaign on Pahalgam attack: An army of AI bots and influencers

Even before Indians knew the scale of the Pahalgam attack, Pakistan had begun its disinformation campaign that sought to convince its Western audience that it was an Indian false flag operation, according to an investigation by Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) at Rutgers University.

The promptness with which Pakistan began its disinformation campaign adds to the suspicion that Pakistani establishment had prior knowledge of the Pahalgam plot. As Firstpost has previously reported , Pakistan’s actions immediately after the Pahalgam attack, ranging from emptying terrorist launchpads in border areas to ramping up military activities, suggested that it had wargamed the response to the attack well in advance.

Prasiddha Sudhakar, a researcher at NCRI, tells Firstpost that the Pakistani disinformation campaign began even before India had gathered the basic information about the attack, such as the number and identities of those killed.

“When India did not have even such basic information, Pakistan had already started a very coordinated disinformation campaign. The campaign largely used state actors and state-aligned media influencers that put out posts on X that this was a false flag operation. The posts soon went viral across Pakistani social media circles,” says Sudhakar.

In its report titled ‘From State Actors to Western Influencers: The Transnational Surge of “False Flag” Disinformation After Terror Attack in India’, the NCRI listed three steps that went into Pakistan’s campaign.

Firstly, state-linked Pakistani actors coordinated to spread the narrative that the Pahalgam attack was a false flag operation by India.

Secondly, bot networks using artificial intelligence (AI)-generated memes and state media gave traction to such claims.

Thirdly, Pakistan roped in major Western influencers like Jackson Hinkle that amplified the message to millions.

Instead of reinforcing the views of a domestic audience, the campaign sought to influence the Western audience. The objective was clear: every government is hostage to public opinion and by shaping public opinion in the West against India, Pakistan sought to put pressure on Western governments to turn on India.

From bots to influencers, how Pakistan peddled anti-India disinformation

In its disinformation campaign, Pakistan brought together influencers for hire and AI.

More than 20,000 posts on X pushed the false flag narrative and around 40 per cent of those posts were from bots, according to the NCRI report.

These bots used generative AI to produce terrorist-themed memes saying ‘Indian false flag exposed’ along with hashtags like #BJPBehindPahalgam and #StopModiFascism on social media as part of their campaign.

Pakistan co-opted influencers like Hinkle, Mohammed Hijab, and Zeeshan Ali — all of whom have a history of peddling jihadist and anti-India, anti-Hindu content for years.

While Hinkle is a vocal supporter of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Iran-backed terrorists, Hijab and Ali have been indicted in a previous NCRI investigation for playing an instrumental role in disseminating anti-Hindu conspiracies and incitement during the Leicester riots in the United Kingdom in 2022.

ALSO READ: Communal unrest in Leicester: Is influential Islamist YouTuber Mohammed Hijab inciting Muslims?

Hinkle used his podcast, ‘Legitimate Targets’, to not just give a platform for rabid, anti-India Pakistani voices, but also himself spewed propaganda. Together, they reached out to millions of people in the West.

The NCRI further found that the disinformation campaign witnessed a “dramatic surge” on May 6 when India conducted the first round of airstrikes under Operation Sindoor .

“Engagement gradually declined after April 26, with minor fluctuations until early May. On May 6, there was a dramatic surge and hashtag volume reached the highest level in the observed period. The increase in social chatter coincided with India’s retaliatory strike on Pakistan and the viral amplification of false flag claims by high-profile influencers like Jackson Hinkle,” the NCRI report noted.

The campaign was not a first, however, and it “mirrors past operations –from Pulwama to the Israel-Hamas conflict– where proxies carry out violence and disinformation ecosystems are activated to shift blame and fracture consensus”.

The report further concluded that there could be real-world consequences of such campaigns beyond narrative warfare.

Referring to how Hijab and Ali’s disinformation previously helped incite violence, the report said, “As seen in Leicester (2022), diaspora-targeted false flag narratives can catalyse real-world unrest, stoke retaliatory violence, and fracture intercommunal trust in Western democracies.”

“The use of generative AI, diaspora targeting, and collaboration with Western influencers marks a dangerous evolution in narrative warfare. Left unchallenged, these operations risk fueling real-world violence and eroding trust in legitimate attribution on the global stage.”

‘India should engage more with international public figures’

The NCRI report noted that the Indian and Pakistani approaches to shaping narrative were quite different: while Pakistan co-opted influencers and used AI, India sought to contain disinformation by banning accounts on X.

Instead of such an approach, India should engage more with international public figures, such as podcasters, influencers, and sociopolitical commentators to get its message across to the world, says Sudhakar.

While Indian diplomats did give interviews to major Western news channels, Sudhakar says that alternative media, such as sociopolitical commentators and podcasters, are now much more potent tools to reach out to the public. She further says that such engagements need to take place outside one’s comfort zones.

Sudhakar says, “More engagement with podcasters or political commentators in India or abroad who ask tough questions is the best way to get your point across to a new audience. You don’t want to just give interviews to people who are already aligned with your beliefs. In fact, it’s much more important to engage with people who don’t necessarily align with you so that you address their questions and reach out to a new audience.”

Sudhakar further says that India should have had a broader outreach in the immediate aftermath of the Pahalgam attack so that the world knew of the kind of terrorist attack India faced and the effect of disinformation campaign was minimised.

“India should have had a bigger outreach to the international community to explain the intensity of what happened in Pahalgam, the brutality of the terrorist attack, because what happened was that there was a vacuum that Pakistani disinformation actors sought to fill. They told the American public that it was a false flag operation. Instead of banning influencers like Jackson Hinkle, India should have told the world proactively about this attack and its historical context,” says Sudhakar.

As for the disinformation campaign, Sudhakar says that it is not limited to the India-Pakistan conflict. She pointed out that the recent murders of Israeli embassy staffers in the United States were also portrayed by many as a false flag attack.

“We have seen such disinformation in nearly all conflicts, whether it is the India-Pakistan conflict or the Israel-Hamas and Ukraine-Russia wars. Authoritarian regimes everywhere resort to disinformation,” says Sudhakar.

Two reasons why people are prone to falling for disinformation spread on social media by bots or influencers are falling trust in mainstream news media and the failure to identify bots, says Sudhakar.

“People are no longer looking at just CNN or Fox News. They are also looking at political commentators and content creators to better understand the issues they consider important. The trust in the mainstream media has greatly eroded and the alternative media, such as podcasters and commentators, have filled that vacuum. The polarisation is such that people don’t usually stick to a news outlet if it no longer reinforces their own perspective or feeds into their confirmation bias,” says Sudhakar.

In a recent remark, India’s Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) General Anil Chauhan said the armed forces had to devote 15 per cent of its time during Operation Sindoor in countering disinformation by Pakistan or pro-Pakistan entities.